Tag: Victor Frankl

War in Heaven

January 27, 2021
Image: Shutterstock

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like for Jews living in Germany circa 1935. As the storm clouds gathered, some must have thought, Let’s get out while we can. Others, however, would ignore the warning signs, labelling their more prescient neighbours as paranoid. Those others, much later as prisoners, were handed soap on their way to the “showers.” Even then, they may have continued to underestimate the peril.

History is a long, sad record of human imprisonment, punctuated by a few precious interludes of relative peace, prosperity and freedom. Do we delude ourselves that such imprisonment could never happen here?

 How thin are the walls which separate a well-ordered world from lurking chaos. (Carl Jung)

Now we face a “new normal” where civil liberties, the rule of law, democracy and privacy are threatened. We see before us the spectre of big tech censorship, robotics, AI, transhumanism, the singularity, total surveillance, a digital currency linked to social credit scores, and “the great reset.” Churchill described “a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime…”, one made more sinister by the technology of his day.  Technology has grown exponentially since then and we will soon reach the singularity, a point in time when exponential growth in technology takes on an infinite value. How much greater then the need for eternal vigilance in the defence of freedom?

Imagine a dystopian future where there is no place to hide, no place to flee. America used to be a beacon for the world, a place of refuge for “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. In medieval times one could always retreat to Sherwood Forest to escape the evil barons, but not now. The technocrats of the future will have us all flagged and tagged.

Both traditional Christianity and Gnosticism proclaim we are in a war – a spiritual war. If it is a war, then it is a “wizard war”, a term used by Churchill to describe the deciding factor in WW2, intelligence and counterintelligence. The Allies won that war because they cracked the German naval code, called Enigma after the device that created the code. “Intelligence” means knowing what is true in the face of overwhelming lies and secrecy. It means discerning truth from falsehood, looking beneath the surface of accepted narratives.

The Secret Book of John describes how the demiurge enslaves humanity: “His power is in deception leading astray.” Therefore, “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” (Descartes) Doubt all the soothing words of re-assurance by those who hide behind a mask of piety. Doubt the official line.

The demiurge is the great counterfeiter, the creator of virtual realities, a liar from the beginning and the father of it, as Jesus said; but “the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32)

The big lie of the demiurge is that we are helpless and cannot resist. “Resistance is futile,” say the Borg. The truth, according to The Secret Book of John, is that we are more powerful than he and that his triumph depends on concealing from us the knowledge of our true identity. Gnosticism is liberation through gnosis or knowledge. Therefore, know who you truly are. The creative imaginative power of human intelligence is but an iteration of the divine creative intelligence which brings all things into being.

Holocaust survivor and author Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) won his private war with the Nazis, but the weapons of his warfare were not carnal but spiritual (as the New Testament tells us). In the camp, “plum tasks” with perks and benefits were offered to inmates, in return for undisclosed assignments. Victor always refused these rewards because he knew a liar when he saw one. Beware the Nazi bearing gifts. Those who volunteered did not get what they bargained for and frequently did not return. Even at the end, as liberation approached, the Nazis said, come with us, we will take you to the Allies in return for clemency.  Victor refused to leave the camp in those final days. Those who accepted the offers were never heard of again. He survived the camp by refusing to believe the lies and by activating his divine creative intelligence in the pursuit of his own dreams; in his case, the completion of a significant academic paper.

The fight against the demiurge begins once we stop believing the official line. The demiurge and his archons depend, for their very survival, on our belief, our intention and our engagement with them. (Secret Book of John) We are no longer food for them when we turn instead to our own dreams and our own creation. This is how we win. 

The first casualties of war are the credulous.

“These are the days which try our souls”, says Thomas Paine. “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” (The American Crises)

© Adrian Charles Smith (2021)

Hermeticism and the Transformation of Consciousness

September 1, 2020
Egyptian God Thoth

In Hermetic tradition, the Egyptian God Thoth, the Ibis-headed god with a writing implement in his hand, was considered the font of all wisdom; a man-god revealing to the Egyptians their knowledge of astronomy, architecture, geometry, medicine and religion. From this advanced knowledge, wonders emerged, such as the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Greek name for Thoth is Hermes, otherwise known as Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice Great Hermes”, the greatest of all priests, the greatest of all philosophers and the greatest of all kings.

The Egyptians were not materialists, so spiritual understandings and principles were not excluded from their science. Therefore, chemistry blended into alchemy, the notion that anything could be transformed, including consciousness.

The Principle of Mentalism, central to Hermeticism, embodies the idea that “All is Mind.” Everything that happens arises from a preceding mental state. For anything to exist, thoughts had to form first, which then manifest as physical reality. This ancient concept is confirmed by some of the most famous modern physicists.

Physicist Max Planck said, “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force —. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Planck, the originator of quantum theory, received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918.

Cambridge physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington,  wrote, “The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind … To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind–stuff.”

During WW1 Sir Arthur collaborated with Albert Einstein to prove Einstein’s new theory on gravity. This was made into an excellent film, Einstein and Eddington. (I have posted a link in the Recommended section.) Eddington was renowned for his ability to explain relativity in understandable terms, and his lectures on this topic were compiled in a book, The Mathematical Theory of Relativity, which Albert Einstein suggested was “the finest presentation of the subject in any language.”

Albert Einstein himself, as well as Stephen Hawking, have described science as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Copernicus made his momentous claim that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of our solar system, after studying hermeticism.

The Principle of Mentalism is the first of seven Hermetic principles. “The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental”, The Kybalion (a hermetic manuscript). Implicit in this view is the notion that the material world, including our compulsions, addictions, moods and attitudes, is plastic to our thought.  Human beings, viewed as individual holographic expressions of an all-encompassing Mind, may have more influence over ourselves and over the world than we can possibly imagine.

This brings us to the Sixth Hermetic Principle, the Principle of Cause and Effect.  The world, and our reaction to it, are the effects of thinking. Can we move mountains with our thinking?

In The Matrix, Neo asks Morpheus, “What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?” Morpheus replies, “No Neo, I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.” Perhaps we are ready once we realize who we truly are — an aspect or fragment of the Divine.

But the prevailing philosophy of determinism says that we have no choice, that we are victims of circumstances, mere pawns in the game of life, that our choice is an illusion; but the Hermeticists, rising to the plane above, learned to master their moods, compulsions, obsessions as well as the world around them by operating from a higher plane of existence, rising above what appears to be a deterministic prison. They became players, rather than being played by their internalized demiurge or tossed to and fro by the will and intentions of others.

Change your thinking and change your world. Sounds easy but we all know it is not. The transmutation of base metal into gold, an allegory for mental mastery, is not easy but still possible.

Psychiatrist Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search For Meaning, was a holocaust survivor. His story tells us we might not always dodge the bullet, but we can still retain mental mastery. He did not dodge the bullet when he lost everything in the camp. In the camp everything was taken away, except one thing, the power to choose one’s mental state. He chose to find meaning in the completion of an academic paper and this act of will saved his life. He did not dodge the bullet but, in the end, he did not have to. He survived to find out “that which does not kill us makes us stronger” (Nietzsche); yet he has the humility to admit, “the best of us did not survive”. 

On one occasion when I was discouraged about something, I picked up a book to see if I could find some words to make me feel better (a very crude from of divination). My eyes immediately fell upon a verse from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

If Victor Frankl could find meaning in Auschwitz, why then is there misery in mansions? The answer lies in the power of the mind to create within itself a heaven or a hell and to do so regardless of external circumstances.

The passage had quite an impact. After a while I put the book down and turned on the television. At that precise moment, someone was reading that very passage. Another of those astonishing synchronicities Jung wrote about, meaningful co-incidences in a meaningless world. In a meaningless world, we cancel the deficit of meaning by rising to the higher planes (pleroma) of our transcendent mental capabilities.

(c) Adrian Charles Smith 2020